StepCounter Gets in Shape

Last year we announced the release of My StepCounter for iOS. Since then, the iOS landscape has changed considerably – HealthKit was announced, two new iPhones have been introduced, and the iPad now supports the same API for CoreMotion as the iPhone.

The original app was designed purely with the iPhone 5s in mind, as this was the only supported hardware available at the time. With an increase in the number of devices that support the step counting API, I thought it was time to make an update to ensure the app works perfectly on these new devices.

While updating the app, I opted to migrate the user interface from Apple’s older Xib format to a single Storyboard. With this change, you’re now able to visualize how My StepCounter will look from within both Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio. The new approach is great for developers using Visual Studio, as they can minimize the amount of time interacting with Xcode on their Mac build host.

Not only does My StepCounter now support Storyboards, a number of images have been replaced with custom views drawn using code generated from PaintCode. The new change has cut down the number of artwork assets the app needs to ship with, and thus reduces the final binary size.

The benefit of this is huge, as it means the app looks great on any screen size without the binary size bloating from additional images. One of my favorite things about using a tool like PaintCode is that the control is live rendered within our storyboard designer so you can instantly see how your App will look in the designer without having to deploy to the simulator or device.

A few extra little additions to the app include integration with Xamarin Insights, a new share option so you can tweet or post your step count, and improved animations across the entire app.

All of the code is up on GitHub for you to download and explore today.